All This And More!

Step Off
Brian Williams, acknowledging that the scrutiny and criticism he was attracting was becoming a distraction for his network, said on Saturday that he was stepping aside as anchor of NBC’s “Nightly News” for the next several days. (New York Times, 2/8/2015)

The Liberal News Oligarchy is in disarray! First Al Sharpton is forced to resign from MSNBC when it is learned that he purposefully ginned up racial conflict in a number of stories, then Brian Williams takes a leave of absence from NBC. 

What?

Al Sharpton hasn't resigned? He is still on the air?


200 Experts Agree
With advice from more than 200 policy experts, Hillary Rodham Clinton is trying to answer what has emerged as a central question of her early presidential campaign strategy: how to address the anger about income inequality without overly vilifying the wealthy. (New York Times, 2/8/2015)

Having tried and failed badly at the "you didn't build it" meme owned by 1%er Lizzie Warren, Hillary searches for a new catch phrase to capture her economic vision. May we suggest the following:

Be Like Bill!

Instead of vilifying the rich, Hillary should embrace wealth, using her husband as the poster child for economic opportunity in America. The backstory goes like this: 

My husband grew up as a backwoods hillbilly. Through hard work and determination he became the governor of Arkansas where his position afforded him sexual access to many local women. He parlayed his roguish charm into a successful run for the highest office in the land which afforded him sexual access to even more women. After leaving office we were "dead broke." He (and I) became fabulously wealthy attracting hundreds of millions of dollars (lots from foreign donors) to our "foundation." (By the way, the foundation thing is the way to go if you can pull it off!) 

Be Like Bill!


Good One!
National Review’s Eliana Johnson quotes a wonderfully pithy response from Louisiana’s Gov. Bobby Jindal: “The Medieval Christian threat is under control, Mr. President. Please deal with the Radical Islamic threat today.” (James Taranto, Wall Street Journal, 2/9/2015)

Source: Democrats Seek to be First to Field Transgendered Candidate

Today we will let Liberal idiocy speak for itself....

Charles Blow, a black, left-wing New York Times columnist, took to Twitter and the pages of the Times to excoriate Yale and a campus police officer over his son being detained at gunpoint. Apparently, Blow’s son met the description of a campus burglar. After learning of the incident, an incensed Blow published a series of racially-charged Tweets followed by a racially-charged Times column.....As it turns out, the officer is black. Yale’s police chief is also black. (Breitbart.com, 1/28/2015)

Liberals sooner or later must raise taxes on the middle class because taxing the rich alone can’t possibly finance all of the Democratic Party’s entitlement schemes. The middle class is where the real money is. So while taxing 529s may die for now, it’s only a matter of time before liberals are back with a carbon tax or value-added tax or something. That’s the real meaning of “middle-class economics.” (Wall Street Journal, 1/28/2015)

 Have you ever been stuck in heavy snow and thought to yourself, “If only Al Sharpton had more power at the federal level!” No sane person ever has, but during an interview about the “snowmageddon” that wasn’t, Bridgeport, Conn. Mayor Bill Finch thanked Sharpton for his fight against global warming, and said he’s needed in Washington.  (Doug Powers, Michellemalkin.com, 1/28/2015)

Stay The Course

Lesser
Less than 48 hours after President Obama nominated Antonio F. Weiss, a longtime adviser on mergers at the investment bank Lazard and a Democratic supporter, to become the under secretary of Treasury for domestic finance, Senator Elizabeth Warren denounced the appointment and said that she would vote against his confirmation.
...
Yet Ms. Warren’s wrath is misdirected, and her understanding of the so-called inversion deal on which she bases much of her opposition appears misinformed...Ms. Warren is, to put it politely, mistaken. (New York Times, 11/24/2014)

Why do we have to put it politely? Can't we just say that 1%er Elizabeth Warren is a complete and utter fraud? The new hero of the Democrat party - like the current president, and former hero of the Democrats - does not have the vaguest idea of how capitalism works. When you are a Democrat and the New York Times corrects you, you know that you screwed up.


Blown
“Unfortunately, Democrats blew the opportunity the American people gave them. We took their mandate and put all of our focus on the wrong problem: health-care reform.” (Senator Chuck Schumer, quoted in the Wall Street Journal, 11/25/2014)

So how do you spin this if you are Democrat?


Lies
But he (Hagel) was not the core of the Obama administration’s military problem. That lies with the president and a national security policy that has too often been incoherent and shifting at a time of mounting international challenges, especially in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. (New York Times editorial, 11/25/2014)

When you are a Democrat and the New York Times says your policy is "incoherent", you know that you screwed up.

So how do you spin this if you are Democrat?


Evidence-Free
Truthfully, the angry and sullen reactions of those who wanted Wilson tried are understandable. They’re understandable because most Americans live in the evidence-free narrative created by malicious media liars, and the politicians they enable. They live in the evidence-free world of the political left, which maintains that America remains deeply racist, that every white cop is Bull Connor, and that every black man shot by police is a Selma marcher. So long as they live in that world, racial reconciliation will remain a dream, and racial polarization will remain a tool of the political and media elite to sell papers, raise cash, and drive votes. (Ben Shapiro, Breitbart.com, 11/24/2014)

Ben Shapiro at Breitbart never disappoints. Think he is wrong? Recall what the despicable Mary Landrieu said about race on the eve of the recent election.


Razor Sharp
Scenario A -- A secretly racist cop sees two unarmed black teenagers (one of whom is six feet five inches tall and weighs 250 pounds) and decides to provoke a fight with them for no apparent reason. The cop decides to shoot the teenager knowing full well that any weapons discharge would be fully investigated. 

Scenario B -- A six foot five inch, 250 pound black teenager - who recently smoked marijuana and who had just minutes before robbed a convenience store - attacks a cop who had asked him to move to the sidewalk from the middle of the street. The teenager is shot during the struggle. 

Occam's razor posits that the simplest or most obvious solution to a problem is most often the correct one.


Refrain
They headed toward City Hall, chanting familiar refrains calling for justice. When they got there, several revelers rushed a police cruiser and smashed the windows with bricks. They then rocked it until it flipped over, and bystanders cheered.

They eventually flipped it back over and tried to set it on fire. Small flames flared up, but the car was not engulfed.

“I thought it was exciting,” said Sherrelle Primm, 26, a protester who watched as the car was vandalized. (New York Times, 11/27/2014)

Even the storefront office of Antonio French, a local politician who was an outspoken leader amid the protests over the shooting, has been destroyed. (New York Times, 11/27/2014)

We have written before about dysfunctional cultures, most notably the Palestinians for whom child suicide bombers are celebrated and sweet treats are passed around to motorists after Jewish rabbis are slaughtered while praying in a synagogue. Cultures which act in such complete opposition to accepted norms of civilization are doomed to failure. Similarly it is with the poor urban underclass wherein burning down their own neighborhood - even the office of one of their own - is celebrated and "exciting."

If Al Sharpton truly wanted to help his people he would teach black youths not to resist the police and would stand in front of the beauty shop, the convenience store and the community center in these neighborhoods and use his powers of persuasion to prevent violence. 

Forget About Your Women and That Water Can

The Game
It has been a decade since he (Obama) confidently declared, hours before his Democratic National Convention debut, “I’m LeBron, baby. ... I got some game.” (New York Times, 10/26/2014)

Note to the President: Stop using basketball references. Everyone remembers them and they usually backfire on you. 


Rarely
Despite Mr. Sharpton’s current mainstream patina, his stock-in-trade has changed little from his Tawana Brawley-Crown Heights days, as the disintegration of his inflammatory narrative about the police shooting in Ferguson, Mo., demonstrates. Apart from rare forays into the rhetoric of personal responsibility, he still peddles the dangerous lie that police officers are the greatest threat facing young black men and that racial discrimination is the main force holding blacks back. (Heather MacDonald, Wall Street Journal, 10/24/2014)

Thanks to MacDonald for a stroll down the lane of Al Sharpton's most ignominious moments. And a reminder that the buffoonish reverend is held in high esteem by Obama and the Democrat party. A party whose senior statesman is an adulterer who lost his law license after committing perjury and whose leading candidate for president in 2016 is the aforementioned adulterer's wife. Also possibly contending for top honors is a millionaire lawyer who rails against the 1% and whose personal history narrative falsely asserts that she is a native American. With an honest media this party would be defunct. 


Telling
"Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs."

"I shorthanded this point the other day, so let me be absolutely clear about what I’ve been saying for a couple of decades: Our economy grows when businesses and entrepreneurs create good-paying jobs here in an America where workers and families are empowered to build from the bottom up and the middle out—not when we hand out tax breaks for corporations that outsource jobs or stash their profits overseas..."

Hillary Clinton. 

Perfectly clear.


Without Regard
When asked whether they would vote for Mrs. Clinton or the Republican nominee for president in 2016, regardless of who that is, 63 percent of Latinos ages 18 to 34 said they would vote for Mrs. Clinton, according to a poll conducted in September by Bendixen and Amandi International for Fusion, the fledgling network owned by ABC and Univision. (New York Times, 10/27/2014)

Why Obama and the Democrats support immigration reform (a.k.a. unilateral rebadging of "illegals" as "legals"). 


Viral
On Sept. 16, Obama promised Americans that his administration was “taking the necessary precautions . . . so that someone with the virus doesn’t get on a plane for the United States.” Four days later, on Sept. 20, an Ebola-infected Liberian national, Thomas Eric Duncan, flew to Dallas, where he later died in a Texas hospital.

Obama further assured Americans that “In the unlikely event that someone with Ebola does reach our shores, we’ve taken new measures so that we’re prepared here at home.” A few weeks later, two Dallas nurses contracted Ebola because, as a nurses union put it, there was “no advance preparedness on what to do with the patient, there was no protocol, there was no system.” And now, a month later, an American doctor with Ebola was taking the subway and bowling in New York — all while following federal safety guidelines. (Marc A. Thiessen, Washington Post, 10/27/2014)

We quote extensively from Thiessen's piece...because it is fun to do so. 


Swept Away
It is time for President Obama to offer clemency to Edward Snowden, the courageous U.S. citizen who revealed the Orwellian reach of the National Security Agency’s sweeping surveillance of Americans. His actions may have broken the law, but his act, as the New York Times editorialized, did the nation “a great service.” (Katrina vanden heuvel, Washington Post, 10/27/2014)

So when Republicans say that Democrats cannot be trusted with national defense and when Republicans say that Democrats are soft on crime, now you know why. 

Do Over

Phased Out
Waged by a president with faded public standing, the new phase will not involve many American troops on the ground, but seems certain to require a far more intense American bombing blitz than in Somalia or Yemen. (New York Times, 9/11/2014)

President Obama's entire foreign policy when it comes to using American might to fight the bad guys is first, do nothing if possible; and second, if that does not work, bomb them. The reason is because he, like all Democrats, cannot get past the Viet Nam War. And so, in their view, the U.S. can NEVER fight another war in which we have "boots on the ground." Soldiers might die and how would that look? Of course, the freedoms that we enjoy today are ONLY because brave men sacrificed their lives to defend our country. In the bizarre world of Democrat national security, boots in the air is OK, boots on the ground, not. The logic is mind-bending, but typical. 


Rally Cap
While other commanders in chief enjoyed a surge in public support when they took the nation to war, the nation is not exactly rallying behind Mr. Obama this time around. A fresh battery of polls this week indicated that most Americans do want him to go after ISIS yet disapprove of his leadership. In other words, they support the policy but not the president.

Peter D. Feaver, a former national security aide to Mr. Bush and President Bill Clinton, said the public unease was due, in part, to Mr. Obama’s own shifting descriptions of the threat and his acknowledgment two weeks ago that he had no strategy yet. “Until tonight, the Obama administration has done a textbook job of following the script on how to undermine public confidence,” he said. (New York Times, 9/11/2014)

It was fascinating to flip channels last night after the President's speech on ISIS. On Fox, the panel discussed how Obama's actions represented a reversal of many of his previous pronouncements and policies. On MSNBC, the panel debated whether Obama needed to get Congressional approval and whether Republicans would obstruct him. The Fox panel included a retired four star general. The MSNBC panel included foreign policy guru Al Sharpton decked out in his trademark track suit. Just kidding! (Sharpton is not really a foreign policy expert. He just plays one on TV.)

MSNBC turned to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders for reaction and analysis. A highly agitated Sanders talked about how the middle class in America is disappearing. Then he talked about the Viet Nam War. He said "Bush-Cheney" three times in sixty seconds. He opined that everything Obama had done so far in Iraq and the Middle East was correct and how what Obama was now proposing was also correct. He and MSNBC's Chris Matthews talked about how they agreed with each other.

Lean Sideways.


Hands Down
The demonstration took place about five miles from the street in Ferguson where Mr. Brown, who was black and unarmed, was killed by a white police officer, Darren Wilson, on Aug. 9. Some witnesses have said that Mr. Brown, 18, had put his hands up in surrender. Officer Wilson, who has not been charged, has been placed on leave, and his location is unknown. (New York Times, 9/11/2014)

Full disclosure (which you will not get from the Times): 

"Others said that Mr. Brown - after robbing a convenience store, assaulting a clerk and refusing police instructions to walk on the sidewalk instead of the middle of the road - punched Officer Wilson in the face."


What The Kids Are Doing
California is poised to become the first state to require all colleges that receive state funds to strengthen their policies on sexual assault by mandating that students give active consent to one another before all sexual activity, either by saying “yes” to a spoken query or by signaling assent in a nonverbal way. (New York Times, 9/10/2014)

For years and years and years all we heard from Liberals was that conservatives were inserting themselves and their morality (no pun intended) into people's bedrooms. 

My how times have changed!



From RedStateVT
On this day we again remember and honor all those citizens who lost their lives due to Islamic terrorism, our soldiers who have also died and those who are now serving.

The Hangman Fumbles With The Noose

Liberal Story Template (Whenever a Black Teenager is Shot by a Cop)
In (city) last night an unarmed black teenager named (name) was shot by police. The teenager was unarmed. Witnesses said that the unarmed victim had his arms up and was surrendering. An autopsy will determine whether he was shot in the back (while unarmed). It is not known if the officer who shot unarmed (name), possibly in the back, was racist. Many people interviewed on the street said he probably was. To protest the violent death of unarmed (name) by an apparently racist patrolman, protesters began robbing liquor stores. 

Friends of (name) described him as a peaceful person who only wanted to help others. They said that his passions included helping out at the local homeless shelter, saving stray cats and Bible study. 

Holy men Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton flew into town together and held a joint service at the (name of church) church. While alternately praising each other's peaceful ministry, they called for calm and for an investigation into police racism, and in particular, the lawless shooting of unarmed black teenagers by racist cops. Attorney General Eric Holder said: "This just proves what I have been saying all along, this is a racist country."

Meanwhile in Chicago last night there were (number) deaths attributable to black-on-black violence. 

(Just kidding about that last part, it is true but not reported.)


Swept Away
Yet at home, Mr. de Blasio, who swept into office on the promise that New York City could be governed from the left, is discovering that liberalism has its limits.

The mayor who shot to fame denouncing stop-and-frisk tactics and luxury condominiums is now defending hard-nosed policing and cutting deals with developers, bowing to the realities of leading an unruly city but also angering an activist left that propelled his rise to the Democratic elite. Impatience with the mayor is now spilling into outcry.
...
“More and more, every day, they find this was a lot more complicated than they thought,” Bertha Lewis, a longtime friend of the mayor and the former chief executive of Acorn, said of the de Blasio administration. (New York Times, 8/20/2014)

Another Liberal disappoints!

(And yes indeed. Liberalism does have its limits!)


Unsolved
But Mitchell Moss, who teaches urban studies at New York University, said the mayor was wise to be cautious.

“Inequality is not something that a mayor of New York can solve, but public safety is,” he said. “You can never make the liberals happy. Because when you ask them what they want, the answer is always: M-O-R-E.” (New York Times, 8/20/2014)

Teacher of the Year!


Erosion
Comity has been eroding for years in Washington, a gridlocked swamp of a city where the 113th Congress is on track to become one of the least productive in history and the president is alienated from his own party. (New York Times, 8/19/2014)

As reported by the New York Times yesterday, Democrat senators and representatives cannot stand Obama. 

Wanted: An Apology From Democrats For Giving Us Obama

Twisted
The latest twist came just hours after Benjamin J. Rhodes, deputy national security adviser, told reporters on Martha’s Vineyard, where President Obama is vacationing, that the president was likely to receive recommendations about how to mount a rescue operation in the next several days. He said those recommendations could have included the use of American ground troops.

But Mr. Rhodes made those comments as the secret team of Marines and Special Operations forces were already on Mount Sinjar, in the middle of a 24-hour trip to talk to the displaced people and pesh merga fighters. (New York Times, 8/14/2014)

White House and State Department officials who were leading U.S. efforts to rein in Israel's military campaign in the Gaza Strip were caught off guard last month when they learned that the Israeli military had been quietly securing supplies of ammunition from the Pentagon without their approval. (Wall Street Journal, 8/13/2014)

So now it is official. As these two passages note, the Obama administration left hand does not know what the Obama administration right hand is doing.


Mindful
Mind you, Obama does deploy grand words proclaiming grand ideas: the “new beginning” with Islam declared in Cairo, the reset with Russia announced in Geneva, global nuclear disarmament proclaimed in Prague (and playacted in a Washington summit). But, untethered from reality, they all disappeared without a trace.
...
He thus admits that Russian and other outside support was crucial to tilting the outcome of this civil war to Bashar al-Assad. Yet he dismisses countervailing U.S. support as useless. He thus tells the world of his disdain for the traditional U.S. role of protecting friends by deterring and counterbalancing adversarial outside powers. (Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, 8/14/2014)

Leave it to Charlemagne Krauthammer to expose Obama's foreign policy incompetence. (See the following for more on Obama's incompetence...)


Poll Tested
Senate Republican strategists like Mr. Dayspring cite several recent polls as evidence that the results will turn on doubts about Mr. Obama’s competence, chiefly a late-June survey by Quinnipiac University in which 54 percent of registered voters said the president was not “competent in running the government.” In mid-July, 57 percent said “no” when asked in a CNN/ORC International poll if Mr. Obama “can manage the government effectively,” and 53 percent said in a Pew Research Center poll that he is not “able to get things done.” (New York Times, 8/14/2014)

More than one-half of the people think Obama is incompetent. But that is not even what excites the editors here at RedStateVT the most. What excites us is that the Liberal media is even willing to talk about Obama's competence. 


Logjam
Since becoming secretary of state in February 2013, John Kerry has carved out a deserved reputation as the ultimate road warrior. Before his current diplomatic trip, Mr. Kerry had traveled 519,136 miles to 51 countries, logging 230 travel days. (New York Times, 8/14/2014)

The New York Times has just got to get a new measure of the success of a secretary of state. With Hillary Clinton we got endless recitations of how many countries she visited and how many miles she traveled. 

As if these constitute success. 

Now, coming after his astonishingly dismal performance in the Middle East, the Times touts "road warrior" Kerry. We suspect that Woody Allen was right: 90% of life is just showing up. 


Injection
While opportunistic civil rights leaders and liberal commentators are pretending that policemen not only routinely kill black people but do so for no reason, the New York Police Commissioner decided to inject some common sense into the discussion.

"What we've seen in the past few months is a number of individuals failing to understand that you must submit to arrest. You cannot resist," said Mr. Bratton in a radio interview Tuesday. "The place to argue your case is in the court, not in the street." (Jason L. Riley, Wall Street Journal, 8/13/2014)

Wonderfully stated by Bratton. Award-winning MSNBC host and revered holy man Al Sharpton could save black lives if - instead of ginning up racial conflict - he urged black teens not to confront police. 

Sources Say Clinton to Pick Rev. Al Sharpton as 2016 Running Mate

A RedStateVT Exclusive
A well-place Democrat strategist speaking under deep cover and wearing one of those Groucho Marx eyeglasses with the fake eyebrows and mustache has revealed that inevitable Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is set to name Rev. Al Sharpton as her 2016 running mate. The strategist - we'll call him Elmo - explained the move: 

First, it was crucial to lock up Sharpton before other potential candidates such as Colonel Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Lying Bear Warren went after the (formerly rotund) Rev. "Clinton simply could not risk the optics of a Warren - Sharpton pairing," said Elmo. "A Native American woman paired with an African American man (and a preacher to boot!) would be tough to beat." In addition, Elmo said, the Clinton move made sense because with Obama and AG Eric Holder no longer in the picture in 2016, Democrats would need someone to gin up racial animosity, a key plank of the party. "Is there a single person in the country who has done more to fan the flames of racial unrest?" 

Elmo would not say if Sharpton would revive his 1970s track suit style. "It would make a lot of sense", Elmo said, "the look reminds many disaffected voters of the racial grievances of the past."


Struggling with Confusion
Sometime after midnight on June 30, 2009, Pfc. Bowe Bergdahl left behind a note in his tent saying he had become disillusioned with the Army, did not support the American mission in Afghanistan and was leaving to start a new life. He slipped off the remote military outpost in Paktika Province on the border with Pakistan and took with him a soft backpack, water, knives, a notebook and writing materials, but left behind his body armor and weapons — startling, given the hostile environment around his outpost. (New York Times, 6/3/2014)

Oh yeah, this is going just swimmingly for Obama. Does he ever touch anything that doesn't end up in a tangled mess?


Back to the Action
The president said the five Taliban figures sent to Qatar in return for Sergeant Bergdahl would be monitored. (New York Times, 6/3/2014)

Huge sigh of relief here. At first we were unsure of whether or not the released terrorists were going to be "monitored."


No Time
It took little time for Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Democrat who is challenging Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican minority leader, in the most high-profile Senate race this year, to distance herself from the Obama administration’s proposal for sharp cuts to emissions from power plants. (New York Times, 6/3/2014)

California Governor Jerry Brown is a gun owner, Senate majority leader Harry Reid is pro-life, and Kentucky's Grimes is pro-coal. 

Democrats all. 

When IS the Times going to write that article about disarray in the Democrat party?

The Tilled Land

Retro
The New York Times website today featured a fourteen minute video retrospective of the Tawana Brawley affair. All will remember the incident in which a black teenager claimed she was raped by several upstate New York cops. Of course it was later determined that it was a complete fabrication. The cops were wrongly accused and, no doubt, actual black women who were victims of rape were thenceforth viewed skeptically.  Figuring prominently in the video was Obama adviser and MSNBC host Al Sharpton. 

Who is a man of God. 
Who did not apologize for his role in falsely inciting racial animosity.
Who does not apologize even today. 
Who has the ear of the President of the United States, the most powerful man in the world. 

Even Eliot Spitzer (a.k.a. Client #9) apologized for whoring around before getting his own television show. 

Not Sharpton.


Let's Dance
An internal watchdog at the Treasury Department is set to report Tuesday that the IRS spent almost $50 million on more than 200 employee conferences from 2010 through 2012, spending the tax-collecting agency's new acting commissioner called "inappropriate." (WSJ, 6/2/2013)

So Liberals, please note. When we say that taxes should not be raised, spending should be cut, this is what we mean.


Stumblebum
A second major piece of legislation that would have made Illinois the 13th state to allow same-sex couples to marry also stumbled in the closing days of the session. The Senate passed a bill to legalize the unions in February, but the House failed to take up the measure in the face of pressure from the Roman Catholic Church and a group of black ministers.  (WSJ, 6/2/2013)

Whatever one's view of gay marriage - and reasonable people can have entirely different opinions - it is worth noting again the opposition of many black clergymen. So for gay marriage advocates, can we have a little more tolerance for those who oppose? Labeling opponents as homophobic is not a good strategy and you might be surprised at the constituency of those who hold divergent views.